The Fourth Circle Read Online Free Page A

holi-ness?
    Although this sin of his is great, has he not, in the next world if not in this, merited forgiveness, having dedicated his talent to the glory and name of God?
    And this is not all. I myself have witnessed how hard he took this pact with the Unclean, how he fought the evil spirits when they came to torment and remind him of the promise he gave their master.
    But his struggle was in vain, for in the end, the vrag always comes for his due.
    And so he comes now, in the place least fitting—as well he knows, may he be cursed to the end of time—to settle his dread balance with the Master's works, painted to the glory of God. Leading him to paint, instead of elysian fields of immortelle and basil, a waste of Hades, drear and dismal; instead of the dear cross, the vrag's circle, the throne of Sotona; and there where one sun stood since time began, like the shining eye of the Lord bestowing light and life, three suns, of dismal colors, infected and infernal, like three rotting teeth of Sotona, to satisfy his creditor and torturer.
    May the Almighty have mercy on his afflicted soul, and on my guiltless one....

6. THE GREAT JOURNEY
    AT LAST, THE call to the Gathering was heard again.
    Three spheres were resting motionless on the top of a low hill, waiting for the other six, scattered about the valley, in order to set off together, since only thus did the tribe move. A wind, sprung from some remote Round, bowed the supple blue blades of rochum, clothing them in swollen pollen dust and filling the in-terspaces with a myriad scents gathered on its long, winding voyage.
    Some scents were familiar to the spheres because they originated in their own Round, in the valley: the rank stench of sopirah, the mild refreshing fragrance of the thorny kootar, the rare precious breath of the hidden shimpra. From the swollen stems of the sopirah oozed a dense milky sap, good for healing wounds caused by reckless rolling over the bare, rocky slopes with their sparse covering of rochum. It alleviated other ailments too, including the aches brought on by autumn swellings. The reddish, friable bark of the kootar was used to stimulate convulsions during the spring triunions; but cautiously, because an overdose would produce a frenzy, a storm of passion, after which bursting would inevitably follow. Shimpra was the rarest, hidden in the most inaccessible crannies; all spheres, whatever else they might be doing hunted it because the sharp-tasting shimpra seeds, dried and rendered milder by rootlets of the ubiquitous rochum, opened the portals to the Great Journey. And the Great Journey took the spheres on wondrous expeditions to the other side, from which many of them never returned.
    The wind abounded in other odors, less familiar and less pungent because of the distance from which they came. Some were hot and bitter, others velvety or cloying. There were also fickle, changeable scents that came and went, leaving a feeling of unattainability and insubstantiality in their wake. The spheres did not know which herbs produced these whiffs of other Rounds beyond the boundaries of the valley.
    The boundaries were crossed only at the time of the Gathering, but the last Gathering had taken place in far-off times, countless cycles ago. The knowledge of it had long since faded from the collective memory of the tribe, so that none of its nine members could now rely on the experience of their predecessors to interpret the messages borne from afar on the odor-laden wind.
From time immemorial, the tribe had had nine members. If a careless sphere burst in the spring at the climax of triune mating, succumbing to a kootar-induced state of uncontrollable rapture, or if another, high on shimpra, embarked on the Great Journey never to return, then the autumn swellings brought not only the regeneration of withered members of the tribe, but also the appearance of new ones to replace those lost, for each yearly cycle in the valley had to commence with nine